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Release No: 211-97May 01, 1997

KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE WILLIAM S. COHEN TO THE CONFERENCE ON TERRORISM, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, AND U.S. STRATEGY THE SAM NUNN POLICY FORUM MAHLER AUDITORIUM, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, ATHENS, GA. MONDAY, APRIL 28, 1997 - 9:10 A.M.

Thank you very much.

I always feel a little bit nervous when I address a new
audience. I feel a little bit like Henry Ford, how after having
amassed his considerable wealth in this country wanted to go back
to his fatherland in County Cork, Ireland. And his reputation
for wealth had long preceded his arrival. When he finally got
off the plane there were a group of local town officials and they
were seeking a contribution for the construction of a local
hospital. And he was quite accustomed to being touched in that
fashion. And he pulled out a check book and he made a check out
for $5,000. The next day in bold print in the local paper, it
said, "Ford contributes $50,000 for the construction of local
hospital." And the town officials came running back and said,
Oh, Mr. Ford, we're terribly sorry. It was not our fault. It
must have been a typographical error and we'll be happy to see to
it that a retraction is printed in tomorrow's paper. And he
said, Wait a minute. I think I've got a better idea. You give
me one wish, I'll give you the balance of $45,000. They said,
That's an offer we can't refuse. Anything you want. So Ford
continued, When that hospital is finally completed, I want to
have a plaque over the entrance way with a quote taken from the
source of my choice. The officials agreed. He pulled out his
check book, gave them the $45,000. The hospital was built, it's
there today. It has a plaque over the entranceway with a quote
taken from the Book of Matthew and it says, "I came unto you as a
stranger and you took me in."

So I come unto you a little bit as a stranger today. I hope
you'll take me in but not quite in that fashion.

Thomas Jefferson once said, God grant that our principle
men be men of principal. And I think we can thank God and also
the State of Georgia that one of our nation's principal men also
has been a man of the highest principle. I'm speaking, of
course, about my friend, Sam Nunn. Most of you who are here in
the front row will recognize the fact, and those of you who watch
C-Span [will as well], members of Congress always refer to
colleagues as "my distinguished friend from Georgia" or Tennessee
or Nevada. And of course, we did that out of professional
courtesy usually just before we were about to make some nasty
remark. You've heard about the statement by one of our
colleagues who said, "I now yield to my good, distinguished
friend from the State of California, for whom I have a minimum of
high regard."

But when it came to Senator Nunn, we always yielded to our
distinguished colleague and friend because with him, we knew that
we had a man of great substance and sincerity and one who's very
serious minded. He emerged as a leading expert among defense
thinkers because he always asked tough questions. He asked tough
questions, he did the hard thinking to try to come to the right
conclusions. And he, like his colleague Senator Lugar, was
always looking over the horizon for the other types of threats
that few were prepared to see. He's left government service, but
he has not left in any way his commitment to the American people.
And this is just one example of his commitment here with this
forum.

I would like to cite for you two quotes before I begin
because I think it might put some things in perspective. One is:
"Our earth is degenerate in these later days. Bribery and
corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents.
Every man wants to write a book. And the end of the world is
evidently approaching." It has a sort of contemporary ring about
it, doesn't it? It was actually written on an Assyrian tablet
some 4700 years ago.

[The second quote:] "It's a gloomy moment in the history of
our country. Not in the lifetime of most men has there been so
much grave and deep apprehension. Never has the future seemed so
uncertain as it does at this time. The domestic economic
situation is in chaos. Our dollar is weak throughout the world.
Prices are so high as to be utterly impossible. The political
cauldron seethes and bubbles with uncertainty. Russia hangs as
usual like a cloud, dark and silent upon the horizon. It is a
solemn moment of our troubles. No man can see the end." This
quote could have been printed in the Atlanta Constitution
yesterday, couldn't it? In fact, it was contained in Harper's
Weekly magazine in 1897.

And so I cite these two particular quotes as examples that
the world has rarely been free of apprehension or danger and it's
unlikely it ever will be. But it's important that we hold up
this lamplight of history so that we don't stumble on the path to
the future.

When the Berlin Wall tumbled down, the Soviet Empire
disintegrated as Senator Nunn mentioned, the United States and
much of the free world was seized with euphoria and what I would
call an accommodating sense of amnesia about the past. It was
said at the time that we stood on the edge of a new world order.
And I recall reading Francis Fukyama who wrote an essay entitled,
"The End of History," where Western democratic capitalism is
going to sweep away the last vestiges of communism and command
economies. And that prompted a South African academic by the
name of Peter Val to comment: "Rejoice my friends or weep with
sorrow. What California is today, the world will be tomorrow."

Of course, Fukyama's thesis failed to examine the potential
clashing cultures of Islam, Christian and Confucian societies as
was noted by the provocative Harvard professor -- and I know I'm
being redundant when I say provocative Harvard professor --
Graham Allison, and also Samuel Huntington and also the futurist
Alvin Toffler. [They held] views that I think are shared by many
throughout the world today.

On one side of the world coin is momentous opportunity. We
see flourishing marketplaces, breathtaking technologies and new
democracies. But on the other side of that coin are startling
new dangers with rising ethnic conflicts and regional aggressors
and terrorism. As Senator Nunn has talked about, the whole
purpose of this meeting today is [focused on] the spread of
weapons of mass destruction. But if we're going to seize the
opportunity and at the same time face the dangers, we have to
ask, like Senator Nunn has asked over the years, tough questions
and do the hard thinking and look over the horizon.

I'm fond of quoting from Admiral James Stockdale when he ran
for the Vice Presidency a few years ago. He asked two questions
as he took the stage. He said, "Who am I? And why am I here?"
And a lot of people met that with derision and laughter, but
they're very important questions; important questions for each of
us to ask as individuals but more importantly as a nation.
Exactly who are we as a country and why is it we're here or there
or anywhere? What is it we hope to achieve as the only world
superpower? What does it mean to be a superpower? What are the
responsibilities, what are the liabilities? Should we reconcile
ourselves instead to being just one power among many and what are
the costs and trade-offs involved in such a formulation?

Well, the Defense Department is working toward a solution to
the security aspects of these questions, these existential
questions that we're asking. It's called the Quadrennial Defense
Review, the QDR. You've probably been reading a little bit about
it. We're well on our way to producing this report within the
next two-and-a-half or three weeks. And the purpose is to take a
very close and thorough examination of our entire defense
structure to ask who are we. How should we shape ourselves?
How should we play a role and what kind of a role in the world
today? And then to devise a strategy and then develop the
resources necessary to match the strategy to carry out our goals.
And it's now devolved into basically a three part defense
strategy.

First, we have to try to shape the security environment and
to protect and promote our national interests by building
stability, reducing threats and deterring aggression. And this
involves a variety of things. It means having a forward deployed
capability. You've heard President Clinton and Vice President
Gore and others such as Secretary Albright talk about having
100,000 people forward deployed throughout the Asia-Pacific
region, 100,000 people forward deployed throughout the European
theater. It also involves conducting joint military exercises
with a variety of countries including even the former Soviet
Union, but many other countries as well. And also helping Russia
and it's neighbors to dismantle nuclear weapons that were once
aimed at the United States for which we can thank both Senator
Nunn and Senator Lugar.

Second, we have to be able to respond to the full spectrum
of threats. And that means having forces that are flexible and
ready and strong. They have to be flexible enough to carry out
any mission all the way from war fighting to emergency
evacuations. They have to be ready enough to respond to any
crisis quickly. And they have to be strong enough to dominate
any aggressor early on in the battle.

And the third part of this strategy is that we have to
prepare now for any threats that might arise in the future.

And so you have this era of rapid change, what [Alvin]
Toffler called "future shock". And we can't fully comprehend the
nature of or predict the challenges that might occur. And so it
might sound contradictory but we have to build a measure of
uncertainty into our planning as well. And preparing for this
uncertain future requires a robust modernization program. It
includes continuing the exploitation of what we call the
revolution in military affairs that's been brought about by rapid
advances in technology, especially information technology. It
involves improving our war fighting capability [to include]
changing the fundamental way we think about fighting. And this
has to be matched by a revolution in business affairs to make the
supporting elements of the Department of Defense more efficient
and responsive.

Today, I think everyone in this room would agree that we
have the world's most powerful military. And our strategy is to
keep our forces without any peer. We don't want to engage in a
fair fight, a contemporary war of attrition. We want to dominate
across the full spectrum of conflict so that if we ever do have
to fight, we win on our terms. But in pursuing this particular
goal, we have to remain mindful that our very preeminence creates
a hazardous paradox in the modern strategic environment. If the
United States cannot be challenged directly, head-to-head, then
our superiority may encourage adversaries to use indirect, what
they call asymmetric means to attack our forces and interests
abroad and even our people here at home. That is, our
adversaries are likely to be students of Sun Tsu and have read
The Art of War and seek advantage over us by using unconventional
strategies to circumvent our strengths and exploit our
vulnerabilities.

I'm sure that most of you are familiar with the story of
Achilles, the great Greek warrior hero. He was made invulnerable
to any weapon or any attack after his mother had dipped him into
the river Styx. But by holding him by the heel, she left,
unfortunately, one small exposed spot. In this world, our
adversaries and future adversaries may search for an Achilles
heel with a variety of creative means. Cyber soldiers and
saboteurs who can threaten our economy and government with
computer viruses or logic bombs. Terrorists who resort to
nuclear, biological or chemical weapons to destroy lives by the
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. And this scenario of a
nuclear, biological or chemical weapon in the hands of a
terrorist cell or rogue nation is not only plausible, it's really
quite real. The information super highway is not traveled only
by pilgrims and high priests of peace. Sick scoundrels,
religious zealots, flat-eyed fanatics and extreme fundamentalists
have entered the stream of electronic commerce and
communication.

Now there's no magic potion, no elixir that we can use to
defeat these pathologies. Instead, we have to treat them like a
chronic disease, constantly alert to the first signs and symptoms
of these cancers that seek to destroy our life blood and the body
politic of our nation.

The symptoms of these diseases are the increasing number of
countries -- they number about 30 -- who possess mature chemical
and biological weapons programs. At least 12 of them have
advanced missile capabilities. As Senator Nunn has indicated, we
need to have a comprehensive approach to treating these
particular symptoms, a coherent national response that would
involve diplomacy and arms control, active and passive defenses,
continued efforts to limit the spread of technology, improved
intelligence collection (that Jim Woolsey's going to talk about)
as well as threat analyses, well-coordinated civil defense
capabilities (that's where Nunn-Lugar II is going to come into
effect), and international standards that bar the production and
storage and distribution of these weapons.

That's why, in my opinion, the Senate made the right
decision last week when it ratified the Chemical Weapons
Convention which bans the production and the possession and the
storage of all of these lethal chemical weapons. It paves the
way to help us improve our detection of large scale weapons
programs before they threaten our troops. It will help reduce
the circumference of those nations who have chemical weapons to a
small, narrow group of rogue states. It will impose trade
restrictions on their ability to acquire those precursor
chemicals for which they can then make those chemical weapons.

But of course, the devil is always in the details, in this
case the details of the treaty itself, and so we now have to work
with the ratifying nations to implement this Convention as
effectively as we can. And we have to encourage those nations
who have not signed and who have not ratified to join the other
responsible members of the international community to try to put
a stop to this proliferation threat. And you probably read just
yesterday where the Russian Duma said, Thank you, but we're
going to wait. We don't have any money right now and maybe in
the fall we'll take it up. And, of course, as a result they've
been severely criticized by the now semi, if not fully,
independent press in the former Soviet Union, which said, Wait a
minute, this is in our interest. Now the United States will have
people who are designing the protocols of inspection. Now the
United States and all those other countries -- 70 plus who have
ratified it -- will be the ones deciding the fate of this
particular convention. They're the ones who will have the
inspectors going in and making the inspections. Why are you
putting this off? And so they're [the Duma] coming under
increased criticism from their own press now for failure to
ratify as quickly as the United States has done.

We also find ourselves in the unique position where we had a
former scientist named Vil Mirzayanov. You correct me on the
pronunciation of his name. But he was scientist who worked for
many years in the former Soviet Union developing chemical weapons
and he discovered they were developing five new types of chemical
weapons, some of them between eight and ten times more lethal
than anthrax. And he originally opposed the Chemical Weapons
Convention, then he read it closely. He said this is important.
He is now in this country after having served a couple years in
prison by virtue of the fact he spoke out against these chemical
weapons. And now he's handing us the blueprints, where they [the
weapons] are, where they're making them, how you can now get
access provided, of course, the former Soviet Union ratifies this
Convention. And so we want to get those countries who haven't
ratified to ratify it. We want to get those countries who ratify
it but who seek to cheat, to make them understand that we're
going to have very intrusive inspection regimes. And so this
Chemical Weapons Convention adds to a number of tools that we
already employ to minimize the threat of weapons of mass
destruction.

Senator Nunn touched upon nuclear weapons and START I.
Under START I we have reduced rather significantly the levels of
nuclear weapons in our two countries. And when President Clinton
and President Yeltsin met recently in Helsinki, it was very
important that they underscore the securing of the ratification
of START II. President Yeltsin pledged to try to get the Duma to
ratify START II. That will again reduce the level of nuclear
weapons to substantially lower levels. And as soon as they
ratify that, we're going to immediately start going on to
negotiations for START III. [This will make it possible] to drop
the levels down between 2,000 and 2,500 [warheads] because the
Russians are concerned that by going to START II they will have
to spend an enormous amount of money to reduce the level of their
multi-warhead or MIRV systems. And so we have programs in place
that are designed to reduce the nature of the threat and it's
something that we have to continue in a very aggressive fashion.

Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar, again, after many people
felt this euphoria that we saw the fall of the Wall, that we saw
the disintegration of the Soviet empire, they resisted being too
euphoric. They looked ahead and they said wait a minute.
Perhaps there's a more dangerous type of threat, namely,
instability. Soviet weapons of mass destruction could seep into
the global black market and land in the hands of those who mean
us harm. And they saw this danger, but they also saw the
opportunity. They saw the opportunity of how we could help. And
these two gentlemen are principally responsible for the passage
of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, otherwise know as Nunn-
Lugar.

I mentioned at a press conference a few moments before we
came onto the stage that I have had occasion to meet with my
Russian counterparts on a frequent basis and we have to go
through translators many times. But there's two words they
understand very clearly in English: Nunn-Lugar, Nunn-Lugar. It's
important to them and they understand the importance. And of
course, Nunn-Lugar has gone beyond simply the nuclear weapons [in
the Former Soviet Union], which are very important. It has also
gone beyond to focus on how we get some kind of control over the
dissemination of weapons of mass destruction here at home. The
kinds of threats that we're likely to face in the future, and
that is, of course, biological and chemical weapons. So
[Congress] passed Nunn-Lugar II to deal with the problems that
we're going to talk about here today.

First, let me explain to you that we should not act out of
any apprehension. Any nation that would threaten us through
nuclear, chemical, biological weapons, we have the ability to
respond with forces and overwhelming force that could devastate
them. In most cases, that will deter anyone from ever attempting
to threaten us with weapons of mass destruction. But it may not
deter everyone. And so we have to aggressively pursue missile
defense programs that address the most
immediate kind of threat, the kind we saw during Desert Storm.
During Desert Storm, we saw Saddam Hussein lobbing SCUD missiles.
Luckily, he didn't put any chemical weapon warheads on those SCUD
missiles. But there is a reason for this -- because we sent a
message to him: Don't even think about it. If you ever think
about attacking our troops with chemical weapons, you no longer
will have much of a country to preside over. So the message got
through and he didn't use them.

But it was a wake up call as we saw those SCUD missiles
coming into Saudi Arabia. We saw Israeli children putting on gas
masks going to school, hiding in basements. It was a wake up
call for all of us. It signaled that there is a real threat that
is spreading out there of weapons tipped with either nuclear or
chemical or biological warheads. That threat is here. The
future is now. And so defending our troops and allies against
these missiles has a top priority.

I won't take the time now because I'm running just a little
bit late in terms of getting into the details of theater missile
defenses versus national missile defenses. Once again, Senator
Nunn was at the forefront of that. We want to have theater
missile defenses to defend our troops against these types of
attacks. At the same time, we want to adhere to the ABM treaty,
which we have with Russia, the former Soviet Union, which would
delineate between the theater missiles and the national ballistic
missile defense system. Senator Nunn was one who insisted that
we be able to demarcate, be able to separate the two. And at
Helsinki, his vision of the need to separate those two held
forth. We now are allowed to develop all of our theater missile
defense systems without violating or being challenged as
violating the ABM treaty.

Finally, let me just talk about the ability to protect
ourselves. Senator Nunn talked about the bombings that have
taken place, the likely threat that's going to come by virtue of
the fact that the information highway is going to give access to
those who are not the most high-minded of people or nations. And
they are going to proliferate the systems that could pose threats
to our security.

The whole purpose of Nunn-Lugar II is to help the Defense
Department to become engaged with local authorities who have the
principal responsibility for protecting local citizens by
determining what type of attack has been launched if any, of
deciding what to do about it, how should they approach this
particular agent, is it lethal, is it contagious, should they --
as Senator Nunn pointed out -- should they dress up in these
space suits that we saw in the streets of Washington just a few
days ago. The very day that we ratified the Chemical Weapons
Convention, you saw on the national television that we had the
local firemen and policemen dressed up in these suits hosing down
people for fear that they might

have been contaminated. All of those decisions need to be
addressed. And it's Nunn-Lugar II which provides the basis for
doing that. And so we owe a great deal of credit and
congratulations to the two gentlemen who are on the stage with me
today.

Senator Nunn said in a speech 10 years ago, We must improve
our military posture with revolutionary developments. We must
educate our publics as to the challenges and opportunities we
confront in preserving and protecting our freedom. Our
challenges are new, and we must think anew, [but] our values and
our goals are constant. His statement reminded me very much of
something that Winston Churchill said. He said, We can be
carried back to the stone age on the gleaming wings of science as
easily as we can glide into the mysteries of the 21st Century.
The choice has always been mans'. Yours and mine. Churchill
also said something during a meeting he had with one our most
distinguished journalists, Stewart Alsop. Alsop recorded this in
a book that he had written some years ago called, Stay of
Execution. Churchill was having dinner with Alsop and he was
sipping a few glasses of champagne and a little bit of brandy
after dinner. Churchill started to get fairly misty eyed and
musing and he said, "America, a great and strong country. Like a
work horse pulling the rest of the world up out of the slop of
despond and despair." And then he looked at Alsop accusingly and
said, "But will it stay the course? Will America stay the
course?" I think 50 years later, history has had its answer. We
have stayed the course because that's our duty. And we will stay
the course thanks to the leadership that's been exhibited by
Senators Nunn, Lugar and others because that is our destiny.